Art History

ARHI 130 PO-01: Modern Latinx American Art

• Instructor: Romero, Rosalia
  • Monday/Wednesday, 1:15-2:30 PM
  • LE Room 217 (LeBus Court)
  • Art History

An introduction to the history of Latin American and Latinx art and visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Examines major developments and innovations by artists, as well as different forms of artistic production: paintings and murals, prints and drawings, sculptures and ceramics. Focus will be on transnational comparisons and connections throughout the Americas.

ARHI 131 PO-01: US Mexico Border Art

• Instructor: Romero, Rosalia
  • Tuesday, 1:15-4:00 PM
  • LE Room 217 (LeBus Court)
  • Art History

This course explores the art of the U.S.-Mexico border from the twentieth century to the present. Students will explore how artists have represented the border in works of painting, sculpture, photography, conceptual, performance, social practice, and activist art. This course explores issues around race, class, gender, and migration, as well the contested ground of Chicanx and Latinx identities. The U.S.-Mexico border will also be a starting point for global and comparative analysis of transnational border art in other parts of Latin America and the world. Letter grade only.

ARHI140 PO-01: The Arts of Africa

• Instructor: Jackson, Phyllis
  • Tuesday, 1:15- 4:00 PM
  • LE Room 110 (LeBus Court)
  • Elective or Art History

Survey exploring aesthetic, formal, cultural and national diversity of African arts and architecture. Emphasis on the social, political and religious dynamics fostering art production, iconographic themes, and aesthetic philosophies at specific historic moments in West, Central and North Africa. Critical study of Western art historical approaches and methods used to study diverse traditional African arts and post- independence cinema. Letter grade only.

ARHI186D PZ-01: Land, Art: Site-Spec to Decolon

• Instructor: Faculty TBD
  • Wednesday, 7:00-9:50 PM
  • Broad Hall 210
  • Art History

Land, Art: From Site Specificity to Decolonization What is the significance of ?land? in contemporary art? While the groundbreaking progenitors of the Land Art movement in the 1960s and 1970s were notable for their large-scale, site-specific installations in supposedly desolate landscapes of the American West, there is a discernible difference in how other artists engage land, utilizing it not as a mere material resource but, rather, a conduit for decolonization. Through a globally comparative approach, this course will bring into conversation the land-based concepts of site specificity and decolonization to better conduct critical scholarship, curatorial work, and creative practice on, about, and with the land.

ARHI186M SC-01Modern Architecture in LA

• Instructor: Koss, Juliet
  • Friday, 1:15-4:00 PM
  • BX Room 108 (Baxter Hall)
  • Art History

The seminar will examine in depth one movement, artist, or other selected topic within the art of the 20th century. Open to juniors and seniors. Topic changes each year. In spring 2022, this course examines the artistic movements of Dada and Surrealism from the beginning of World War I to the end of World War II, with stops in Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, New York, and Paris. It will explore how painters, photographers, filmmakers, and writers challenged aesthetic, political, and social conventions in such forms as the visual arts, poetry, and performance and will look at how Surrealism subsumed Dada, dominated Paris, and spread during World War II through a diaspora of artistic emigres to Latin America and the United States.

ARHI186N SC-01: Seminar in 20th Century Art

• Instructor: Hackbarth, Daniel
  • Tuesday/Thursday, 9:35-10:50 AM
  • BX Room 108 (Baxter Hall)
  • Art History

This seminar explores avant-garde art in the United States over the course of the last hundred years as it responded to emerging technologies and practices of communication, entertainment, and sound/image reproduction and, in the process, spawned new artistic media. Case studies include assemblage and junk art by New York Dadaists and by African American artists in Los Angeles, conceptual artists’ use of photocopy machines and video, avant-garde composers’ repurposing of tape recorders, and films examining shifts in human consciousness and the U.S. social fabric under conditions of intensifying mediation.

ARHI186W PO-01: Interrogating Whiteness: Race, Sex, Rep

• Instructor: Jackson, Phyllis
  • Thursday, 1:15-4:00 PM
  • LE Room 110 (LeBus Court)
  • Media Theory or Art History

Interdisciplinary course studying select African disaporan visual arts interrogating linguistic, conceptual, and visual solipsisms contributing to the construction and reproduction of whiteness in aesthetics, studio art, film, video, and social media. Course assignments and activities develop critical visual literacy employing a constructionist approach to the production of knowledge and cultural criticism. Students encouraged to decode and deconstruct interlocking binary oppositions, such as blackness/whiteness, female/male, propaganda/art, modernity/postmodernity, citizen/immigrant, which dominate in Euroethnic intellectual thought, our racially-gendered relations of power, representational practices, and contemporary [white] nationalist visual grammar. Letter grade only.

ARHI187 SC-01: Old New Media

• Instructor: Hackbarth, Daniel
  • Tuesday, 2:45-5:30 PM
  • Baxter Hall Room 108
  • Art History

Beginning with the birth of photography in the 1830s, attending to telegraphy, telephony, radio, and television, and ending with video, this seminar explores the history of the fascination, fear, and peculiar associations that have accompanied new technological developments in Europe and the United States. Prerequisite(s): One previous art history course or permission of the instructor.